Malware Prevention

A friend of mine has malware and we believe that this led to the website he's building becoming infected too. To clear the infection on the website, the hosting company is doing it and billing him for the labor costs. My question is not how to remove the malware he has, but rather how to prevent the same thing from happening in the future.

I know that *most* antiviruses are really very lousy at preventing any malware other than viruses. However some years ago I learnt that Norton 360 (as irritating as it was) took a different approach - rather than list all known malware and apply heuristics to help identify any other unknown malware, it instead used a whiteball list of all known non-malware software and blocked everything not on the list (to the annoyance of many people). Is this still true of current Norton products, and are there other antivirus programs that take this zero tolerance approach?

Essentially I'm trying to find a longterm solution for the guy that will as close to prevent malware as possible, regardless of any reasonable software costs or irritating "program X has been blocked/quarantined, clear here to unblock/quarantine it" messages.

 

Yes this was my point - most try to guess what is and what is not malware. My thought was there was an alternative approach to protection software which essentially blocks almost everything, and does away with heuristics entirely.

I agree with you wholeheartedly about education.

I do think that there must be such a solution to the one I'm asking for though. At the very least, preventing him from being able to download executables and limiting web scripts would do the trick.